Dr. Robert Sumner passed away in December 2016. The Biblical Evangelist newspaper is no longer being published and the ministry of Biblical Evangelism has ceased operation.

The remaining inventory of his books and gospel tracts was transferred to The Baptist Tabernacle of Los Angeles and may be ordered here.

Do We Need The "Flat Tax" System?
Robert L. Sumner

Here is another reason in its favor: Pamela Gardiner, who happens to be the Deputy Inspector General for tax affairs at the United States Treasury Department, had her staff take a look at how the current 16,000-plus employees of the Internal Revenue System use their computers. The results may shock you (then, again, for those of you in the know, they probably won’t). The survey spanned several months and the researchers discovered that the workers (I utilize the term “workers” loosely) used their personal computers over half the time – 8,250 hours out of 16,275 hours online – for personal business, much of it monkey business.

How did the personal use pan out? Well, 23% of the time it was used playing around in computer chat rooms, 20% of the time it was being used to investigate personal financial information or stock trading, 7% of the time involved online shopping, and the rest of the time it was used for either gambling or visiting sex sites and downloading pornography.

Since only half the IRS employees are doing the work, why do we need the other half? We recommend firing the majority of the workers (you know, put a “pink slip” in their pay envelope) who were guilty of stealing taxpayer money (what else would you call taking taxpayer money in salary when being paid to do government work and using the time for things personal?), and keeping the honest 49% to head up a new tax office to take care of either a flat tax method or a sales tax method to replace the income tax (it wouldn’t need any more than that to do it; in fact, probably no where near as many)! Are you for it?

To make a sad story worse, many of the workers who are honestly using their time to answer the telephones and respond to e-mail on their computers are totally inept and unqualified for their positions. Often they do not know any more about the questions being asked than does the one asking the questions. Repeated newspaper investigations, especially around late March and early April, have proven this to be true. With a flat tax or a federal income tax, what questions would there be to mess up?